Deep Fake: Everything, Something or Nothing?

“Everything is not a subject about which anything of much interest can be said.” — C.S. Lewis, in contemplating “a deity really believed in who, by being all things, is almost nothing.”

AUTHOR”S NOTE: I’ve been engaged in a stimulating conversation in the online r/tarot community regarding the topic “When we ask a question of the cards, who (or what) answers us?” I offered my usual sly response:

“I think the initial inquiry invokes our subconscious awareness (aka subliminal “hunches”) of impending circumstances (I like Joseph Maxwell’s description of this) but where the subconscious gets its foreknowledge is wide open to conjecture: Higher Self, Collective Unconscious, Akashic Record, Astral Plane, the Mind of God, Plato’s Soul of the World, etc. Call it the “Great Unknown.” I also use the acronym SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess.)”

But there was an extremely broad span of opinion ranging from utterly secular to entirely mystical that covered the full spectrum of metaphysical thought on the source of our insights. To be honest, I love some of these ideas, although many were the “usual suspects” reiterated throughout the thread.

• The Higher Self
• The inner self via psychological associations
• The Divine or Supreme Being
• Esoteric symbolism
• The energy of the Universe, or Nature
• Spirit guides, ancestors, angels or deities
• Our intuitive reaction to the images
• A mirror of the world in all its randomness
• Chaos magic
• Our subconscious awareness of the future
• The sitter’s subconscious awareness of the future
• “Holy helpers” or “holy guardian spirits”
• No external entity whatsoever, tarot “just works”
• Psychoanalytical introspection akin to therapy
• Fate or destiny
• A targeted source, to avoid uninvited intervention
• Animism, or “the spirit of the cards”
• Quantum determinism (our perceptions alter our reality)
• Confirmation bias, wishful thinking or “selective hearing”
• Extrasensory perception
• Creative imagination (like artists, we create what we envision)
• The Spirit World via mediumship
• The “Barnum Effect” (drawing personal meaning from vague generalities)
• Demons or devils
• The “evil feminine” (Catholic view)
• Genetic memory
• A total mystery
• Whatever is in our head at the time
• Synchronicity
• Experience with and knowledge of the cards
• Just ask the tarot to reveal its source of information

In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis described the Medieval view of Nature as a supernatural “personification” and — although later exalted as a goddess — not an abstract concept symbolic of “God’s highest, much less His only, creature.” It was believed that Nature inhabited the “middle ground” between the Cosmos and the Earth (Aristotle’s “sublunary” sphere, or within the orbit of the Moon) and thus served as an intermediary agent or functionary that represented “less than everything.” It strikes me that this would be a more immediately available origin for tarot’s “channeled knowledge” than an impersonal Universe-at-large, and in esoteric theory it seems to align well with the mystique of the lubricious Astral Plane. I’ve never bought into the notion of a benevolent Universe that invariably has our best interests at heart; it is inherently indifferent, so we must nibble at the more accessible fringes to obtain an inkling of what it has in store for us.

This idea of agency harks back to the Platonic “Principle of the Triad” (so-named by Lewis) that is implied but not explicitly stated as such in Plato’s Timaeus: “It is impossible that two things only should be joined together without a third. There must be some bond in between both to bring them together.” Lewis goes on to observe that: “This principle is . . . assumed in the assertion of the Symposium that god does not meet man. They can encounter one another only indirectly; there must be some wire, some medium, some introducer, some bridge — a third thing of some sort — in between them. Daemons fill the gap.”

These “daemons” were considered to be invisible residents of the natural (that is, sublunar) air and not of the cosmic aether that transcended it; the term translates as “genius” and was later reduced to human terms in the form of literary or artistic talent. But as disinterested arbiters in this quest for knowledge it isn’t clear whose side they will take in responding to our questions. In other words, will our aspirations be confirmed or will we only be disabused of our fantasies? Will we get a straight answer or only a veiled insinuation that we must puzzle out for ourselves? Like William Cowper’s vision of God, “they plant their footsteps in the sea and ride upon the storm.” Due to this fickleness of purpose, there is little to be gained by trying to second-guess them.

Therein lies the vulnerability to the “deep fake” implications of the title. We like to assume that, because our intentions are noble, the putative wisdom we receive via the cards will be unimpeachable. Most of the more ingenuous answers to the reddit inquiry display an optimistic certainty that we can access a hotline to ultimate truth in the matter at hand when in fact we are often just “shooting in the dark with our fingers crossed.” For this reason I always recommend that any seemingly-inspired message we perceive to be absolutely authentic should merely be “taken under advisement” (with at least a modest grain of salt) and, when reading for others, we should make sure our sitters understand that nothing is guaranteed, so any guidance in the cards should be viewed from a “forewarned is forearmed” perspective.

Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on November 28, 2024.